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by MichaelGG 4122 days ago
How are all of you using any npm-based system combined with a continuous integration or clean build environment? It seems that a simple yeoman/grunt setup that just preprocesses some HTML and JS takes... a very long time. A minute or two just for the actual work. Plus 5-15 minutes for npm to make a thousand requests and write 10K+ files to the filesystem.

I hack around it by keeping node_modules around as a special resource on a custom build server and symlinking it in, but that wouldn't work with a proper "start from zero" build system.
4 comments
doublerebel 4121 days ago
1) We have our own private npm that can optionally include a caching layer. This has been invaluable since the beginning of our company to manage internal dependencies.

2) We use StriderCD, the self-hosted CD/CI, and it too supports caching node_modules. 2 minutes is a 'long' time for us from git push to autodeploy.

3) We use gulp and npm always. Grunt and bower are a mess.

EDIT: Also, we npm shinkwrap projects. It avoids numerous issues and makes module caching a natural part of the process.

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jessaustin 4121 days ago
Grunt and bower are a mess.

grunt has its issues, but you are correct that bower is truly a mess. "Let's do one of the many jobs that npm (the tool we use to install bower) already does, but not as well!" No thanks.

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Kudos 4122 days ago
Both Travis CI and Circle CI cache your node_modules directory between builds. If you don't change your package.json, it just uses that cache instead.
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tieTYT 4122 days ago
> It seems that a simple yeoman/grunt setup that just preprocesses some HTML and JS takes... a very long time.

I have not experienced this. I built a 15k+ line CoffeeScript app. Every time a file changed it would compile it to JS and run thousands of unit tests in ~1 second.

As for the clean NPM... I never deleted that directory. I believe I read an article somewhere that you should actually commit your module dir. Maybe that's no longer in vogue though?

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lucaspiller 4122 days ago
Why does it matter if your build system takes a while? You shouldn't be pushing it to there until you are happy it works locally, at which point you can move on to the next task and forget about it.
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